from service, because—as they gave him salad
every day during summer—he feared that,
when the winter came, they would make him
eat hay. A French garçon would consent to
consume a certain portion of hay—perhaps
slily smoking it in his pipe—provided he was
also allowed access to an inexhaustible salad-
bowl; bread, oil, and vinegar, of course, being
clauses in the bargain. ''How often a day
would you like to eat salad?" I inquired of a
servant.—"Oh! five or six times; ça m'est
égal, Monsieur. It's all the same to me."

And then sorrel!—with half-a-dozen notes
of admiration after it, if the printer will put
them. Who, that has never quitted England,
knows anything of the inestimable value of
that much-loved acetarious plant ? Look at
the little boy and girl sitting on the step of
yonder door, the entrance of the wayside inn,
au dernier sou, or, the last halfpenny. With
a slice of bread grasped in one fist, and a
bunch of fresh sorrel-leaves in the other,
those children are making a contented meal
by taking an alternate bite at each. Their
place in natural history is a little ambiguous;
for on one hand they are herbivorous, and on
the other graminivorous. Enter, to call for a
glass of white beer. The mistress cannot
attend to you; she makes you wait a little
instant. She is busy stewing down a whole
rick of sorrel, salting it for winter soup.
Next to the capture of Sebastopol, the French
army in the Crimea would be most delighted
to conquer a vast plain of broad-leaved sorrel.
My landlady thinks me an openhanded
Englishman, because, instead of selling to others
a barrowful of sorrel-leaves out of my garden,
I give them to her. With sorrel, hot water,
butter, and bread, no poor French household
consider themselves pinched for a repast;
and wealthy peasants are often content with
no better fare for dinner and supper. Now,
if an English Lady Bountiful were to call on
some not-too-well-off mother of a family, and
say, "I am going to send you a present which
will be useful during the coming winter," and
then were to appear with a cart-load of green
sorrel-leaves, what would the object of
benevolence say at the sight of a stock of such
provision? As soon as the first surprise was
over, would she not give vent to her angry
disappointment (if she did not charitably
pronounce Lady B. to be crazy)? And if she
had sufficient strength to pitch the cart with
its verdant contents into the nearest ditch,
would not her neighbours think she was
properly vindicating the rights and honour of
insulted poor folks? But suppose the mistress
of a French château were to make a similar
offer to the wife of one of her labouring men,
how the dame's eyes would sparkle! how her
hands would clap! and what a stamp of joy
would be imprinted on the earthen floor!
As soon as the welcome cargo had arrived,
it would be carefully picked and shreded into
a tub. The half-extinguished lo.s on the
hearth would be set blazing afresh; the iron-
pot, or chaudron, would be hitched up into
its suspensory mechanism; and the tall stoneware
jar would be filled to the brim with
bottle-green paste for hybernal pottage. A
French garden, without a large plot of sorrel,
would be as incomplete as a Christmas dinner-
table without a plum-pudding.

With the exception of the indispensable
salad, and occasionally sorrel and onions, the
vegetables thus admitted to the national
stomach give but little trouble to the
digestive organs, enormous as is their aggregate
mass, in consequence of the aid which the
soup-pot renders. "Give me," exclaims a
Frenchwoman, "leeks, sorrel, turnips, carrots,
butter, bread, and a few fried onions, and I
will make you a soupe-maigre that shall ravish
you! It shall all be boiled down so divinely
smooth and tender, that you will not feel the
want of meat." Soup that is not meagre
contains good store of animal ingredients;
but there must be practical truth and wisdom
in administering to the human frame the
essence of all those roots and greens. All
vegetables are more or less medicinal;
although, in such as we usually consume, the
nutritious particles have the upper hand.
Men cannot live on medicine, any more than
on poison. But, medicines are most healthily
efficient when taken in minute and oft-
repeated doses. Witness the iodine, or salt, or
whatever it is, which gives a sea-side
residence its beneficial effect. Deprive a man of
all access to herbage, or its extracts; shut
him in a ship for a twelvemonths' discovery-
voyage, and you will soon learn that, after
all, soupe-maigre is not a thing to be safely
despised.

Do not, however, suppose that the
Flemings care nothing about the ideal of gardening;
that the limit of their admiration is a
Daniel Lambert turnip, or a fat-fair-and-
forty cabbage. On the contrary, they grow
even ornamental grass in pots, and treat
flowers as tenderly as if they were sentient
beings. A notary who should get up a society
for the prevention of cruelty to helpless pot-
plants, might enroll a respectable number of
members. Tender-hearted Flemings would
be just as ready as benevolent Chinese to
purchase ill-treated koo-shoo, or trees dwarfed
by stunting and starving, for the pleasure of
liberating them into the open ground. They
pet their flowers, and introduce them, like
spoiled children, into places where they really
have no business. In a milliner's shop-window,
the silks, satins, and artificial flowers, at
ten francs the bouquet, are pushed on one
side, to make way for a real pompone rose,
which the artiste in personal adornment has
bought, for ten sous, of a nurseryman. The
cobbler sweeps away his seedy collection of
boots and shoes, to display three or four
beautiful calceolarias in bloom, at the mouth of
the cellar-habitation which serves as his den.
His children are dying by inches of asphyxia;
himself and his wife—to judge from the